


Humiliation and Duty

by lwise2019



Series: Mikkel's Story [23]
Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-16
Updated: 2020-02-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:40:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22757185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lwise2019/pseuds/lwise2019
Summary: Sigrun has no faith in Mikkel's fighting skills, but at least he has his duties.
Series: Mikkel's Story [23]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1536739
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6





	Humiliation and Duty

In the morning, Sigrun was eager to get back to work seeking out books to scavenge. Tuuri had been able to identify a location thought to be lucrative, and between them, the two women had worked out a somewhat roundabout route nearly all of which Lalli had scouted. Mikkel would have preferred that the captain remain with the tank for at least a day to give her wound a chance to start healing, but as that was certainly out of the question, he persuaded her to allow him to rig a sling for her injured arm.

“There, that should keep it in place,” he stated, finishing up the makeshift sling constructed from bandages. “You merely need to make sure that the stitches are not disturbed.”

“So I don't have to be careful as long as the arm stays still?”

Mikkel paused, somewhat at a loss. “You … don't _have_ to be, but I would highly recommend it.”

“Okay, thanks. I'll grab my buddy and we'll get out of your hair!”

“Yes, about Emil … I have a suggestion. Perhaps, due to his injury, it would be preferable that he stayed here today, and instead _I_ \--”

“EEMIIIL!!!” Sigrun shouted, not even glancing at him.

Mikkel looked around to see Emil in the sleeping compartment, frowning down at the still-sleeping Lalli and questioning Tuuri as she passed carrying the book she intended to work on. “I don't get it,” the Swede said, “Is he ill?”

“Oh, you could say that,” Tuuri answered casually. “He'll just need to rest up a bit.”

“Okay ...” Emil said hesitantly and, turning toward the door to join Sigrun, looked back to tell Lalli, “Feel better, I guess.” To Sigrun, he said with a fair imitation of enthusiasm, “I'm ready to go!”

“Great. We'll be back in time for food, bye, keep safe!” she told Mikkel, who still hesitated beside her.

“Sigrun! I _have_ to insist!” he said, putting a hand to her shoulder to keep her from leaving. “You're _both_ injured, while I am not. So I propose that Emil is allowed to rest up here today and _I_ \--”

Shrugging off his hand, she stated firmly, “Let me stop you right there: _No._ ”

“My leg does kind of hurt a lot ...” Emil put in.

“No it doesn't. Stop being a crybaby about it.” To Mikkel, she concluded, “Nothing personal! I just have zero faith in your fighting skills!”

Humiliated, Mikkel stood silently watching the two explorers – Captain and Cleanser, Norwegian and Swede – trot off into the grossling-haunted city. Inwardly he raged at himself.

_Why did I say it again after she dismissed me the first time? When has she ever changed her mind at my request?_

_But she's injured! She needs someone able-bodied to guard her back! And I'm an experienced soldier, not an unlicked cub like Emil. I've fought grosslings at dagger-point, yes, and I have the scars to prove it._

_I didn't exactly cover myself with glory yesterday – why did I swing the wrong way **again??** – but Emil didn't really either. The only good shot he got off was reflex when I … well … when I hit him._

_If she doesn't come back … If **they** don't come back … If Emil can't guard her back because he's injured … because **I** injured him ..._

He cut short the thought. _My duty is to take care of the tank. I will do my duty._ He turned and climbed into the tank. First things first: they needed water.

As he pulled a bucket out of a cabinet, Reynir approached him nervously. “Can I help? Can I do something to help?”

“No.” But the young Icelander was so sincere that Mikkel couldn't leave him with a curt negation. “I'm going to gather snow to melt for water. You can't help me with that; it would be more trouble to guard you while you do it than to do it myself.”

The redhead looked crushed. “But I want to help – I'm eating your food, and Lalli has to sleep on the floor so I can have his bunk, and Sigrun – Sigrun got bitten --”

Mikkel held up a hand. “First off, no one likes the food so no one begrudges it. Who knows how long we have to stay here, and whether we'll run out of food? One person more or less doesn't make much difference. Anyway, we agreed that if we ran out of food, we'd eat _you_ so we might as well keep you healthy.” The other looked uncertain as to whether Mikkel might actually be serious.

“Lalli has slept on the floor since the expedition started. I don't know why, but he doesn't want his bunk so you aren't displacing him. And as for Sigrun –” _How to put this without seeming to criticize her?_ “As for Sigrun, she was bitten because you were away from the safety of the tank. And that was not your decision,” he went on hastily before Reynir could apologize as his face clearly showed that he wished to do. “You saw … _something_ ... that you thought was dangerous and you warned us – as you should, as any of us would. It was _our_ decision to call you away from the tank to examine it more closely. And you salvaged the situation by bringing the kitten. If you hadn't done that ...”

The Icelander looked very thoughtful. “Still,” he said, “I want to help. I want to do _something_.”

About to refuse him again, Mikkel was struck by a thought. He turned back to the cabinet and pulled out the second bucket that was stored there. “Okay. You stand by the door with this bucket. You don't put a foot outside the door, you understand that? Tuuri!”

In her surprise at being addressed, she nearly dropped the book she was holding. “Uh – yes?”

“Get the kitten and stand by the door with Reynir. I'll bring a bucket of snow and swap buckets with Reynir --”

“And I'll dump the snow in the water heater!” Reynir finished in delight.

“Right, and Tuuri, if the kitten alerts, you yell and close the door. You yell _while_ you close the door. Don't wait for me! Are we agreed?”

They were certainly agreed, and Mikkel set to work, heading out to collect clean snow well away from footprints and the crude latrine they had set up behind the statue. Toiling back and forth, packing snow in the bucket at one end and swapping buckets at the other, Mikkel had plenty of time to think.

> As the Old World died, the beleaguered survivors on Bornholm – in between organizing quarantines and patrolling the shores for infected sea-going mammals – listened to its death throes on battery-powered, and later hand-cranked, radios, their power having failed quickly in the absence of fuel deliveries. Professional radio stations soon ceased to broadcast and there was nothing left but ham radio operators powering their transmissions with private generators, but one by one they too went off the air and there was only silence.
> 
> The survivors heard a mixture of news, rumors, and outright fantasy brought on by a situation of unparalleled horror and terror. It was said that the Rash was an escaped biological weapon, that it had fallen from the stars, that it was a judgement on sinful humanity – and it was said that the Americans had a cure, or perhaps it was the Chinese, or the British, or … the Danes. 

All this went through Mikkel's mind as he worked. He remembered that his grandmother Else had believed to her dying day that Denmark had found a cure. She had been a small child when the Rash struck; she had been visiting her grandmother on Bornholm, and her mother, being a doctor, had returned to Copenhagen to help, leaving Else behind with her father and brother. Mikkel himself had never believed in the Danish cure, which had come to be called the Danish Salvation; indeed, he had never believed in any cure. After all, if there had been a cure, there should have been cured survivors and there were not. Not one.

And yet – “We're not giving up on you, not now.”

 _Suppose there **was** a cure,_ he thought. _Any surviving patient would find himself in the middle of thousands – even tens of thousands – of grosslings. At Kastrup, hundreds of immunes, well-trained and heavily armed, were massacred with no survivors in a single night. What chance would a civilian have?_

_And yet – those patients weren't killed by grosslings. They presumably weren't euthanized either. What did they die of?_

The job went faster than expected, and in less than an hour the water heater was full of melted snow. Dusting snow off and thanking the other two, Mikkel thought that fuel would be the next problem, but elaborate buildings such as surrounded them were sure to have wooden furniture somewhere that they could break up.

“Is there something else I can help with?” Reynir asked eagerly.

“Soon. There's a stack of bedding and clothing to be washed but I need to sort it out first. You go help Tuuri while I do that.”

As he passed the radio compartment with an armload of sheets, he caught the sound of his own name and paused to listen to Tuuri talking to Reynir. Tuuri had intended to continue transcribing the journal they had found, and it seemed that she had observed something.

“Mikkel was right, this journal _is_ important! See, _this_ looks like _that_. Doesn't it?” He looked around the door to see that she was holding up one of the vials that might or might not have once contained a cure, and comparing it to a flier tucked in the journal.

“I … guess,” Reynir answered uncertainly.

Undeterred, Tuuri went on, “The label is blank, and the flier in the book doesn't say much. Just that these'll be distributed to treatment centers 'as soon as possible'. I don't think this doctor ever got them though. He didn't write anything about it. But … maybe …” She paused, gazing at the flier as she thought. “Eee!” she exclaimed excitedly, jumping to her feet, “Maybe someone _did_ come up with a vaccine and they were trying to give these out to people!”

“I did consider it to be a possibility,” Mikkel put in, forbearing to explain the difference between a cure and a vaccine.

“Didn't seem to work too well,” Reynir muttered. “Those skeletons in there were really, really dead ...”

“We've got to find out where they came from!” Tuuri pressed her knuckles to her mouth, staring down at the flier as if by staring she could compel it to answer her.

“The package is too degraded to tell the origin,” Mikkel said, holding it up and tilting it back and forth in an attempt to see any details. “But this label does say these were distributed from the Kastellet fort. It's very close by.”

“Tell Sigrun! She --”

“Left and will not be back for a while,” Mikkel reminded her.

“Well, then we need to go check it out _ourselves_. We just have to be careful! This is too important to postpone another day!”

Mikkel patted her soothingly. “No, it is not. I'm interested too, but it can wait. We have our respective tasks to attend to here.”

* * *

There were plenty of things to think about other than the possible cure. When Mikkel tried to take Lalli's blanket and top sheet – meaning to return the blanket immediately along with a fresh sheet – the scout clutched the bedding tightly and rolled away from him, muttering something in an annoyed tone.

Mikkel stepped back, frowning. It was a good sign that the little Finn resisted losing his bedding, but he'd more than slept the clock around and evidently meant to go on sleeping. Granted that he had been exhausted, but this seemed extreme. The medic in Mikkel was troubled, and he took a few steps back to the radio compartment where Tuuri was happily transcribing the journal.

“Tuuri, I'm worried about your cousin. This sleep --”

“It's a mage thing,” she said casually and then, glancing up at his expression, went on a bit defensively, “I know you don't believe us, but it happens. He overused his powers – he didn't explain exactly how, but it was for us and you shouldn't be angry at him for it. He just has to rest now and he'll be fine. Really, he'll be fine,” she finished as if to reassure herself.

Mikkel frowned, but there was nothing to be done short of dragging the boy out of bed and slapping him awake … which the older man would do, if the situation were dire enough, but it was not dire now. Let him sleep.

With Reynir's sometimes bumbling assistance, the wash bucket was set up in the sleeping compartment and Mikkel went to work scrubbing bedding and then clothing while his young assistant wrung out each article and hung it to dry. At first the Icelander tried to carry on a conversation, but the Dane's brief and unenthusiastic answers soon silenced him.

The stowaway was another problem. He had nothing but the clothes he stood up in, and there were no spare clothes to give him. Each member of the team had exactly two suits of clothes so they could wear one while the other was cleaned or repaired. This reminded Mikkel that he needed to fix Reynir's jacket. The weather would be getting ever colder, and the other couldn't keep going outside in a ripped jacket. Besides, it offended Mikkel's tidy mind to see damaged clothing.

Reynir's clothes were clean enough for now, but they would have to be washed soon if he were to avoid slowly becoming filthy. Considering this, Mikkel supposed that the young man could simply wrap himself in a blanket and wait while Mikkel washed and dried his clothes. That would do, given the lack of alternatives.

But even these thoughts could not wholly distract him from thinking of the cure. And thinking of the dead patients.

_What happened to them? They didn't die of the Rash – I'm certain of that. Did the cure **itself** kill them? But no, surely not. The authorities would release a cure that killed a few patients; that's a tragic fact of medicine, that sometimes cures can kill. But they wouldn't release a cure that killed **every** patient, and those are all really, really dead, as the boy said._

_So what could have killed them? Okay, let's think. They were unconscious and their doctors – or medics or nurses or caretakers or whatever they were – left them unattended. Not willingly of course. Who knows, maybe one of those doctors was Grandma Else's own mother ..._

He paused at that, his thoughts derailed by memories of elderly Else's eyes shining as she spoke of her mother bravely going back to Copenhagen to fight the Rash: “And we never saw her again, but she was so smart, and I know she went back to work on the cure, I know she must have helped find it! It's out there – the Danish Salvation! If we were only brave enough to go back and get it, we could be free of this scourge!”

_But those patients are all dead. Why, if the cure is real?_

_Okay, unconscious patients, unattended in a dying city._

_In the winter._

_In the **winter!** It was cold, and the power had failed, and there was no one to keep the fire going … Did they just freeze? Could it be as simple as that?_

_And then too, this was a cure, not a vaccine as Tuuri called it. If it was anything like an antibiotic, it needed repeated treatments. With the doctors gone, there would be no more treatments. So the cure succeeded in stopping the progress of the disease, but the patients didn't get enough to actually reverse the damage and bring them out of their comas, so they just faded away._

_That could be. It **could** be! They are all dead, but that doesn't prove that the cure doesn't work. It could still be out there, the Danish Salvation that Grandma Else dreamed of. **We** haven't found a cure in nine decades of research, but **they** had more researchers than we have **people** , many times more, and they had **billions** of patients to examine and tools that we can't even dream of because we have no idea what they even were or did._

He had reached this point in his thoughts just as he finished mopping the floor. The kitten, who had been taken outside several times to relieve herself since they first adopted her, had trotted outside on her own into the mud which Mikkel had churned up just outside the door. Returning proudly from doing her duty _all by herself_ , she tracked muddy paw prints across the freshly cleaned floor. Seeing this, reaching for the mop he had just put away, Mikkel muttered to himself, “A thankless job.” The Icelander, having no idea what the Dane had muttered, said brightly and sincerely, “Thank you for letting me help,” just before noticing the kitten's actions, scooping her up, and hastily cleaning her paws with a freshly laundered washcloth.

Mikkel sighed and put away his apron, turning to look out the door. The sun was high in the sky and there were hours to go before the adventurers returned or darkness fell. Stay here, do odd jobs, talk to the children? Or go out and look for the Danish Salvation? He wasn't conscious of making the decision, but the decision was made.

_I'm here, Grandma. **I** am brave enough to go get it ._


End file.
